Monthly Archives: January 2012

After seeing Oregon Cabaret Theatre’s Cabaret Christmas, I was determined to interview Kymberli Colbourne, a delightful comedic actress, director, and cabaret artist. We lunched at Dragonfly in Ashland.

EH: How did you create Cabaret Christmas?

KC: We went into development in May of last year. There was a lot of research and blood, sweat, and tears. That’s the thing about creativity. Creativity is about chaos and risk.

EH: What draws you to perform on stage?

KC: I love the immediacy of the relationship between myself, the playwright, the actors, and the audience. There’s no other place where that happens in that way. For me the true meaning of theater is ensemble. I consider the audience part of that ensemble because it’s the energy that they bring that completes what we do.

The playwright gives us a skeleton. In rehearsals we put the flesh on that skeleton. Then every night we have to breathe the life into our characters in each moment. What the audience brings is the final piece of the relationship; that makes that world real, because they buy into it, and they take the journey with us.

Dee Maaske and her husband Paul Roland have both enjoyed long and successful acting careers. Their work in theater has taken them throughout the world. They now make their home in Ashland, where Maaske has performed numerous roles for twenty seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We visited over a scrumptious lunch at Larks.

EH: Is there a favorite role that you would like to play?

DM: I would like to find a really fine new play that explores the feminist movement. We need to remember what that was all about. To my knowledge, nobody’s written about the feminists of the 1970s, and they should. Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug had to fight so hard. These women really took a lot of abuse as they opened doors for young women to become architects, doctors, engineers, and heads of corporations. It wasn’t just about burning your bra. All movements are about something much deeper than that, something that hits the core of a population: hence the Occupy Movement today.